A Family Kept in the Dark
For years, the family of Jacob Collins received reassuring reports. Their son, taken into foster care in Ontario from his home community of Natuashish in northern Labrador, was doing well — or so they were told. He was thriving. He was safe.
The reality, a public inquiry has now found, was something else entirely.
Collins died at the age of 22, and a subsequent investigation into his time in care painted a devastating picture. A lawyer representing his family told the inquiry that Collins had lived "like a prisoner" during his years in the Ontario system — a stark and painful contrast to the rosy updates his family back home had received.
The Inquiry's Findings
The public inquiry placed Collins's experience in foster care under the microscope, examining how a young Innu man from a remote northern community ended up so isolated and so poorly served by the institutions that were supposed to protect him.
The Collins family's case raises hard questions that advocates and Indigenous leaders across Canada have been pressing for decades: what happens to Indigenous children — especially those from remote First Nations communities — when they are placed in provincial child welfare systems far from home? Who is accountable for their wellbeing? And when something goes wrong, why are families so often the last to know?
Collins's story is not an isolated one. Canada's child welfare system has long been criticized for disproportionately removing Indigenous children from their communities and placing them with non-Indigenous families or in institutional settings with little cultural connection or family oversight. The legacy of the Sixties Scoop and ongoing concerns about the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care have fuelled years of calls for reform at both the federal and provincial levels.
A System That Failed
For the Innu community of Natuashish, a remote fly-in community on the coast of Labrador, Collins's death is a profound loss — and the inquiry's findings are a reminder of how far families can be from the truth about their children's lives once those children enter a system that spans thousands of kilometres.
His family trusted that the reports they received were accurate. They trusted that the system had their son's best interests at heart. The inquiry suggests that trust was misplaced.
Indigenous child welfare advocates argue that meaningful reform requires far more than better reporting practices. It requires recognizing Indigenous nations' inherent jurisdiction over their own children, funding community-based services so removal becomes a last resort rather than a default, and ensuring that when children are placed in care, their cultural identity and family connections are actively maintained — not quietly eroded.
Why This Matters Now
The federal government has in recent years moved to reform the Indigenous child welfare system under Bill C-92, affirming Indigenous peoples' right to exercise jurisdiction over child and family services. But implementation has been slow, and cases like Jacob Collins's are a sobering reminder that legislation alone doesn't undo decades of systemic harm.
For his family in Natuashish, no inquiry report will bring Jacob back. But the public record it creates — a documented account of how the system failed him — is a form of accountability, and a call to do far better.
Source: CBC News. Original reporting by CBC Newfoundland & Labrador.
